Pyschedelic music has always encouraged intergenerational influence. Thus West Midlander Pete “Sonic Boom” Kember, in his 1980s Spacemen 3 days – with Jason Pierce of Spiritualized – channelled Krautrock, The Velvet Underground, The Silver Apples and The Stooges into his relentlessly narcotic jams, then moved sideways into representing the spirit of very early synthesiser experimenters. And Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, solo and with peculiar Baltimore grouping Animal Collective, since 1999 has collided all kinds of freak folk, psyche-pop, and above all Smile-era Beach Boys. Together they brought all of the above together on their 2022 Reset album and various subsequent reworks of tracks from that.
And it’s all here again on A ? of When – with a lot of strong hints that the pair are searching for something eternal in their influences. The pop part of psyche-pop is amplified yet more, and it feels like they’re digging into the influences that Brian Wilson brought to play on his most baroque follies – Phil Spector, girl groups, hymns, nursery rhymes, jingles – and looking for kind of mystical fusion of romantic love and universal communion that Wilson, and even more so the fleetingly majestic Judee Sill, fried their minds trying to encapsulate. It’s an admirable mission and they achieve a lot of magic.
The swoops, chirps and burbles of Kember’s synths add a dreamy, alien, outside-of-time feel to the Wilsonian strings, chimes and choirs which help keep it lifted above pastiche, and especially when the songs are at their most repetitious and hypnotic it does achieve sublimity. The sticking point, though, is often Lennox’s singing. It has a kind of adenoidal buzz common to a lot of 21st century US alt/psyche vocals which can disrupt the reverie. Also, with the best will in the world, the duo don’t have the melodic skills of Wilson or Sill, so especially when Lennox drops in a cutesy idiom like “gee whizz” things can tip more to nursery rhyme than cosmic hymn. Which is fine – psychedelia often contains the childlike too – and if you are in the mood for it, the grand ambition of this intricate puzzle box of a record is super rewarding. But you do really need to be in the mood for it for those spells not to break.
Listen to "Lucky Charm"
